Keep It Simple: The Most Important Lesson I Learned From A Year of Plant-Based Cooking
As most of you already know, last year I embarked on a journey to increase my knowledge of vegetarian and vegan recipes and I truly learned a lot from making a whole new slew of dishes that I’ve never made before, from simple veggie pasta, to Indian chickpea masala.
Some of you may be wondering…How many of those dishes am I still making?
The honest answer is…Just a couple. A lot of the dishes I chose were because I wanted to stick with simple, but also have something that is presentable in a blog. I think that most of the dishes I made I will make again at some point, but they haven’t become a part of my typical cooking repertoire yet. That said, there is a really important lesson I took away from my year of making various dishes that has been become fundamental in how I imagine plant-based cooking: for everyday cooking, keep it simple. Like…Really simple.
For daily cooking, simple is king
Am I making veggie pasta every week? Am I baking up some baba ghanoush on the regular? Nope. But I have let go of this idea that I have to “learn” vegetarian or vegan cooking. Just like with any cooking (meat or not), there are always more recipes to learn, but just like how I operated before trying to reduce my meat consumption, I stick with what’s simple, filling, tasty, and gives me a good variety of nutrients. Want to know what I’ve been making the most regularly since finishing my challenge?
Sandwiches (no meat, obviously) and veggies and tofu over rice. That’s it.
Why? Because it turns out they require almost no thought and are super quick, easy, and healthy to make. They also have as much variety as you have sauces and veggies!
When I go grocery shopping, I keep a few simple rules in mind:
- Always have some rice in the rice cooker and/or some good bread on hand.
- Always have some kind of sauce to flavor stuff up with.
- Always have tofu in the fridge.
- Keep a mix of at least 3 different kinds of veggies on hand (from different “categories” of veggies, maybe something starchy, something leafy green, and something colorful/flavorful)
With these 4 basic rules, I have almost unlimited variety, plenty of nutrition, and most importantly, flavor! Sure, sometimes I’ll buy beans or natto for my protein. Sometimes I’ll buy some pasta and pasta sauce. It doesn’t mean I stick ONLY to these 4 rules, but they give me the basics to just be able to eat quick, healthy, and tasty food all the time.
When you cut out meat, you’ve only cut out a tiny number of potential ingredients!
After all, when you cook plant-based, you still have access to the hundreds of ingredients you had before, and you’ve only removed a few (beef, pork, chicken, fish, cheese, etc). Heck, now that I’ve eliminated meats from my cooking, I’ve now tried things like seitan, and more new plant-based meat-substitutes comes out all the time. I have more variety than I did with meat!
And as I put together my sandwich or place some veggies and tofu over my rice, I remind myself that plant-based cooking is not harder, more complicated, or require more planning than foods with meat. Plant-based cooking is just…Cooking.
Thanks for reading!
